Recent Comments

About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

You've time traveled before in games. You've rewind, paused, and slowed time. You've made time move when you move. You've jumped between past, present, and future.

You control time in Induction as well. But rather than controlling the passage of time, you break it completely. Movies, books, and games have talked about time loops and paradoxes for many decades, and in Induction, you must create your own to solve its surprisingly mind-bending puzzles.

Induction isn't the first game to play with the concept of time loops, but it may the one that portrays the idea in all its complexities. In other games, usually "time loop" means restarting the level along a copy of your past self. In Induction, time loop means multiple time lines happening simultaneously while you interact with and alter the actions of your past and future selves to your advantage.

But first you need to learn to basics. Induction starts simply, its minimalist stages asking you to activate switches and navigate isometric levels. Soon you get the ability to reset the stage and create a loop, while you still navigate the level as your past self repeats its actions. With that addition, Induction gradually ratchets up the challenge, forcing you to work in tandem with your past actions or even "program" maneuvers and then move your old self to a new location.

And then Induction lets you fully control your past self and the complexity only builds from there. However, you're never explicitly taught these mechanics. There are no distinct tutorials or text tips. Much like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll, you learn the intricacies of time travel and how to best use each new mechanic through experimentation, through attempting one method and refining and trying again. (A helpful undo feature lets you test and try without limits) Induction is the kind of puzzle game where you want to replay a level several times until you understand how and why exactly your solution worked...and feeling like a genius when everything falls into place flawlessly.